{ "title": [ "", "What makes a fashion brand, a brand, and how we do it at atelierYVF", "Creative direction" ] , "date": 1779698887 , "content": [ "" , [ "more-p", "This series of articles explores how fashion brands are built. The content is drawn from my lectures at HK PolyU School of Fashion & Textiles" ] , [ "hr" ] , [ "pc", "Why learning brand management is important for all fashion students, even and especially creatives" ] , [ "p", "The fashion industry rewards and promotes the bold and the visible: the silhouette, the campaign, the show. The architecture beneath the fashion brand is largely misunderstood, and its complexity often underestimated." ] , [ "p", "Overall, only half of the fashion industry actually makes money (BoF State of Fashion 2026, p.132) and every year, many aesthetically compelling young labels fail to develop commercially because the system that should bring financial profitability to the designs either was never built, or is deficient. A commonly cited figure holds that 80% of fashion brands fail within five years. The figure has no traceable origin in any authoritative source and is most likely folklore, but its popularity and persistence across the industry point to a widely shared perception that building a successful fashion brand is genuinely, exceptionally hard." ] , [ "p", "Fashion Design schools usually don't teach business skill in creative paths. Creativity and craft are at the core of their training, and communication is well understood by designers born with social media. Other domains however — collection design beyond range planning, customer targeting beyond the persona, financial planning, pricing, distribution and retail — are all terra incognita." ] , [ "more-p", "My MA students at PolyU typically rate themselves 0-1 out of 5 in finance and business management when I start my lectures. The curricula of elitist graduate fashion design establishments such as IFM Paris or Parsons NY don't cover business management." ] , [ "more-hidden", "(FIT has it)." ] , [ "p", "When asked how they would launch a brand, most designers have no plan and operate by default:" ] , [ "ul", [ "" , "They can only imagine a customer who shares their own age, lifestyle, taste references and cultural position." , "They price by instinct or imitation: same as competition or slightly cheaper, because price is the only lever they can imagine." , "They would never consider distributing through wholesalers, not to mention collaborating with them." ] ] , [ "p", "These projects are all doomed to fail. Visually coherent, conceptually interesting, commercially adrift." ] , [ "p-hidden", "A brand that is admired by friends and peers, and struggles to generate revenue from real customers." ] , [ "p", "Worse than just failing, many young designers frequently become the prey of predatory investors who take control of the brand under the disguise of developing it, wring out its essence, take the cash in from gullible customers who believed in the original story, and toss the brand and designer when there is nothing left but logo tshirts and hoodies." ] , [ "p-hidden", "To avoid that trap, the question every young designer must answer honestly is not only: "is my aesthetic original?" It is: "What is the problem that my brand addresses, for whom, and why is no one else properly solving it?"" ] , [ "img-hidden", [ "events-polyu-sft5976-18.jpg" ] ] , [ "p-hidden", "Over the years, Yasmina and I have developed a simple system that we use to help structure our thoughts and business decisions. The system treats no domain as more important than another, the discipline is to set each on a course that is coherent with the brand direction." ] , [ "hr" ] , [ "p", "Notably, every significant fashion brand was built by at least two people. There is no Christian Dior without Marcel Boussac. No Rei Kawakubo without Adrian Joffe. No Tom Ford at Gucci without Domenico de Sole. No Rick Owens without Michèle Lamy. No Shushu without Tong. The creative intelligence and the operational intelligence are almost never the same person, and the history of the industry reflects that consistently." ] , [ "p", "A strong partner brings complementary skills in the domains that do not come naturally to you. They dare to challenge your decisions before the market does. They comfort you through failure, and celebrate success genuinely." ] , [ "p", "So why should the designer care if someone else can be in charge of these other topics? Precisely because some partners are unworthy, and because a brand requires coherence. Efficient collaboration requires anticipation and trust, both of which are rooted in understanding. As with a dance partner, you need to know what the other can or cannot do and trust them to make the right move." ] , [ "more-p", "At atelierYVF, Yasmina deals with customers, designs and makes the dresses. I run show production, fashion innovation, admin and finance so that she can." ] , [ "hr" ] , [ "p", "The next article in this series is on creative direction: the decisions that define what a brand stands for and which gap in the market it is built to address." ] , [ "p-hidden", "A logo is not a brand. Neither is a manifesto, a collection, or a founding story. These are components, entirely dependent on something that holds them together." ] , [ "p-hidden", "It is not a logo. Logos are identifiers, shorthand for something that already exists in the mind of the person reading them. They borrow meaning; they do not create it." ] , [ "p-hidden", "It is not a manifesto. A manifesto describes values. Every brand in the industry claims to believe in beauty, craft, and authenticity. None of those words, alone or together, constitute a position. A position requires exclusion: it must be possible to disagree with it." ] , [ "p-hidden", "It is not a collection of original designs. Designs are the most visible part of a brand and the part most easily copied, most quickly dated, and least capable of sustaining a business on its own." ] , [ "p-hidden", "What these three have in common is that they are outputs. A brand is the system that produces outputs consistently enough, and coherently enough, that a customer builds a relationship with you that no single product could create alone." ] ] , "author": "Alex VB" }